ABSTRACT
In a statement that he references to Koselleck, Heinz Schilling (1988:265) characterises ‘confessionalisation’ as a ‘movement [that] so intensified the interpenetration of religion and society, confession and politics, that there arose irreconcilable, total confrontations that endangered social life as such’. Schilling is describing two separate conducts of life that emerged in the 1500s, one organised by the post-Reformation confessions and the other organised by the emerging territorial State. Having emerged separately, they then merged into the ‘confessional State’. However, by the 1600s, the continuing process of ‘confessionalisation’ led to catastrophic civil wars between rival confessional communities that held each other in total scorn.
